It’s unlikely you will see what Alex Janvier sees; the swirling, merging colours of the elements that form the unique vision of the 81-year-old Denesuline Salteaux artist. His work, more than 150 pieces, is on display in a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada.

It’s taken a long time, but contemporary Indigenous art is finally getting its due at the National Gallery, Greg Hill says, pointing to major exhibitions of the work of Daphne Odjig, Norval Morrisseau and now Alex Janvier. Hill curated all three solo shows.

The gallery will continue this evolution, Hill says. In 2017, the Canadian galleries will be called the Canadian and Indigenous galleries. Indigenous art will hang alongside the Group of Seven and Alex Colville.

Janvier — whose ceiling painting Morning Star-Gambeh Then has been a star attraction at the Museum of History since 1993 — has a career that spans more than 65 years.

Alex Janvier in front of “Lubicon,” painted in 1988. A major retrospective of the Canadian artist’s work opens Friday, Nov. 25 at the National Gallery of Canada.Wayne Cuddington /
Postmedia

Janvier was always an artist, even though as a child he may not have totally recognized that fact. But his talent was noted in the most unusual place, the Roman Catholic run Blue Quills residential school near St. Paul in northern Alberta. Every Friday afternoon, Janvier was in art class. That became his escape from the harsh world of the school.

Blue Quills “was not a place you would like,” he said in an interview after a media session in the gallery on Wednesday.

“I just had the ability to start with. They saw something. It was just pure luck. I was going to become a Montreal Canadiens hockey player. That was the real ambition, but that one failed.

“By the time I was 14, I was called an artist. I didn’t know what that meant, but that’s what people called me … I never thought I’d go this far in the world of art. It has been a very, very important part of my being.”

Despite the hardship of the school, Janvier persevered. His early works included some religious paintings. He won some prizes for his work. Some paintings from these early days are on display, including Our Lady of the Teepee and Sacred Heart.

These more representational paintings gave way to more abstract and modernist works, many of which are on circular canvases. They draw on his Denesuline roots, merged with the influences of artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Joan Miro.

One of these, Spring Equinox, dominates with glorious colour the show’s opening room, which is dotted with 34 such circles all painted since the 1970s. There is no doubt right away that Janvier is his own man as an artist.

But, as the exhibition also shows, Janvier can play powerfully in any style from realistic flower paintings to classic abstract expressionist pieces. In each his innate talent shines through strongly.

For curator Hill, “no one paints like Alex Janvier.

“(He) has been at the forefront of contemporary indigenous art since the 1960s when he and a group of artists fought their way into galleries and forced the establishment to recognize the work as capital ‘A’ Art and not ethnographic objects.”

Janvier was introduced to “the basics” of art from a German emigre named Carl Altenberg, who was schooled in the Bauhaus tradition and whom Janvier met at an art club in St. Paul.

Janvier, who was grounded in Denesuline culture and language before he went into the residential school, has overcome much in his life as an Indigenous artist. He has been an activist, an educator and an Indian Affairs bureaucrat. He often signed his paintings with his treaty number.

As a young student he had hoped to study at the Ontario College of Art and Design, but a decision by the Indian agent on his home reserve in northern Alberta denied him that dream and he studied at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary instead. Recently, OCAD awarded Janvier an honorary degree correcting that original indignity.

He also crusaded to have the works of Indigenous artists treated as art and not just as an anthropological oddity.

Part of that effort was his involvement in what Janvier calls the “Indian Group of 8” (others all it the Indian Group of 7) that was formed in the early 1970s. Included were Bill Reid, Norval Morrisseau and Daphne Odjig. The only other surviving member, Louis Sanchez, was in attendance this past Wednesday for a special media preview at the gallery. One room in the show is devoted to abstract portraits of the group by Janvier.

Janvier knows he is leaving a legacy to a new generation of Indigenous artists.

“We had envisioned that the next generation was going to make it bigger and better. I don’t know yet, but they are coming along. I see at least a dozen.”

Many of his paintings speak directly to matters of concern for Indigenous people. One of the most famous is Lubicon. The striking red panel protests the treatment of the Lubicon Lake band by oil companies during the 1980s in Alberta.

“This particular painting was painted in a red background. I was angry, and when I get angry I can do beautiful things.”

Despite the hard road he has taken, Janvier is a patriot. As he told an assembled gathering Wednesday morning, “it’s wonderful to be a Canadian … We are really important to the rest of the world because we practise freedom here.”

Today, Janvier lives and works in Cold Lake, Alta., four hours north of Edmonton. He has a Douglas Cardinal-designed gallery there and has returned to a traditional lifestyle.

“I used to live near Edmonton and that’s where my career started to take off. But after we had children I had to bring them back to the natural way of living … In nature by the lake. So that became the incentive. It worked beautifully because all of them got educated. They can stand with anybody in the world today.”

Like the canvasses he loves to paint upon, his life has circled back to his roots.

Alex JanvierWhere: National Gallery of Canada When: The exhibition continues to April 17, 2017

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